Okay, something new with all the problems I've been having lately.  All of a sudden, when I open a new, empty file or an existing one, the 3D view is completely black.  All the objects are listed on the side and when I render, everything shows up in the render.  But that doesnt help much if I cant see what Im doing anywhere else. I'm running XP, have an Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT card, 4GB Ram, Intel Core Duo, I've updated all the drivers for the graphics card, emptied the Temp folder, etc... but it stills just has a black screen.

To make things even more interesting (and probably connected), Poser is acting up too.  When I try and load up an existing pz3 file, the screen goes white and then comes back piece by piece.  When it finally loads, all the animation info is lost.  All I have is whatever is in frame 1.

Even weirder, my computer insists on claiming that Carrara is the only program I have to open pz3 files.  When I go into Explorer and try to tell it to use Poser instead, it ignores my request and won't even show Poser in the list of program files.  (I have to browse for it, but even then, it still doesnt show up on the list.)

Any suggestions?

video drive update?

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Been there, done that.
I'm wondering if it might be a Windows problem.  The Poser problem started a few weeks ago and since then I've upgraded my computer with a new motherboard, RAM, and cpu.  I just noticed the Carrara problem today.  I've uninstalled both programs and reinstalled both (separately), but thats been no help, either.

Its onboard video card? Try in preferences to put to software render to see if the same happens.

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Its not an onboard card, its a separate one that's supposed to be pretty damn good. 
I tried the software render in Poser, but that didnt help.

Going into the View Menu and turning off Production Frame gets my scene to display sometimes.

www.youtube.com/user/ShawnDriscollCG

Turn off antialasing on your vid card.

I sent a ticket and Daz knows about it but it ain't going to get fixed because the work around is to turn off antialiasing and Daz figers that's a resolve.

There are a couple of threads about it at Daz forum.

PS, jiggle camera control ball and it goes back to normal. Yet not a bug according to Daz.

Wow!  Thanks, Tashar... that took care of my Carrara problem and now it runs like a champ with all that new memory and cpu.
Now... if I could only figure out what the $%&*$ is wrong with Poser?!

Whats your Page File or Scratch Disk look like?

Yank My Doodle, It's a Dandy!

My pagefile is set at 3 GB on the C drive (Poser is on a separate harddrive).
My texture spooling in Carrara is set at 520 MB.
I have 4 GB RAM, by the way.

The file I was speaking of is also called Virtual Memory, and is found under Control Panel > System > Advanced > Performance > Settings> Advanced > Virtual Memory... 

The Page, or Virtual Memory for your system is shown here. This should not be confused with the scratch or spool files for your programs. Windows arbitrarily limits this file space between 2 and 4092 K of space.

Your system should be able to handle it. I only have 2.75 G of ram on each of my liquid cooled Core(TM)2 Duo's, running nine RAID Drives in an array of 3 logical drives, and have never had this sort of problem.

Check to make sure your fans (if any) are running, you have plenty of ventilation room, and your case isn't full of dust.

You may want to contact the manufacturer if you have a band name. Otherwise, if its a home built unit, I would suggest to have each of your boards, motherboard and video card, checked out on line to see what the trouble might be. 

Yank My Doodle, It's a Dandy!

I had exactly this problem the other day. It turned out to be conflict between my video driver's open GL display and carrara's. 
I had fiddled with the drivers in the control panel and it had the effect of switching the carrara default to "open GL". Then I got that annoying black screen that would light up again when I jiggled it with the pan tool. 
When I reset the default preview render to "software" all was bright and speedy again.